Best movie ever!

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

I happened to catch a portion of this movie on the Sy-Fy channel about a year ago and since it looked pretty good at the time I decided to procure a copy recently. Having now seen this movie in its entirety I can honestly say that it wasn't too bad. Essentially, "Reb Halland" (Billy Drago) is the leader of an outlaw gang back in the days of the old west who has made a deal with the Devil for immortality. "Preacher McCready" (Gil Gerard) is a mystic who comes to the town of Hope Springs to protect it from Reb Halland's gang by erecting 5 Wiccan totems in various places. His plan works to perfection until a man comes along and pulls one out of the ground. When that happens all hell breaks loose as Reb's gang kills everyone in town—on a Friday the 13th no less. They then commit suicide and wait for an opportunity to kill again. Fast forward to the present when a bus carrying students from Carmel College find themselves in this same town—and it just happens to be on a Friday the 13th. Now rather than reveal any more of the film and risk ruining it for those who haven't seen it I will just say that for a made-for-television movie it had decent special effects and enough suspense to keep things somewhat interesting for the most part. Likewise it didn't hurt to have two attractive actresses in Jessica Rose (as "Jenna") and Annabelle Wallis ("Serena"). Again, while it certainly wasn't the best horror movie ever made I found it to be enjoyable enough and I rate it as about average.

Remember the good old days when SyFy Channel was something special. It was an entire channel devoted to the science fiction, horror and fantasy genres, but then somewhere along the way, it stopped running classic TV shows like "Dark Shadows" and "Friday The 13th The Series" and movies with the Classic Universal Monsters, and instead became notorious for becoming a springboard for the worse freaking Indy flicks to ever rise out of the minds of former fan fiction writers. Some of their TV shows have been awesome, but the majority of their films are movies so bad that you have to wonder what was going on through their minds when they approved them. The special effects are always cheap, the actors are frequently inexperienced, and the plots are constantly far-fetched and unbelievable to the point that one can't help but think SyFy no longer has any respect for its fan base. Case in point: "Ghost Town" starring Gil Gerard and Billy Drago, two very well liked and respected actors no longer at the prime of their careers getting stuck making these low-budget flicks. Gil Gerard plays Preacher MacReady, the new pastor of a church in the small Texas settlement of Hope Springs. Immediately, you think, hey, a ghost story set in the Old West, that's a novel idea no one has done before, but then there's talk about markers to block out a great evil, and you start thinking, "Uh, say what?" It turns out Billy Drago is Reb Halland, the local devil-worshipping outlaw that's been annoying or cursing the town recently. How these markers are supposed to work against a flesh and blood outlaw is never explained, but it gets even more ridiculous. Halland's band shoot and kill everyone in town as some form of sacrifice for eternal life, but then they kill each other, which conveniently nullifies that eternal life promise, and now, they're ghosts. They could have become ghosts without shooting up the town, but wait, it gets even more stupid. Shoot forward to the present and a bus full of hockey jocks and debate team geeks who end up in town and become stranded because it's not a bad horror movie if they're not trapped in an unholy place. Cue Halland's band to begin slaughtering and killing everyone all over again for no reason whatsoever. Now, I can't stress this often enough; ghost movies should not be turned into splatter and gore flicks; the two genres together just never work together. It's bad enough there's too much opening exposition, but now, there's no attempt or effort made for the movie to be scary as long as it resorts for the cheap thrills and hokey special effects. Students and teachers are getting picked off left and right, and somehow, someway, it's deduced that the students have to replace a lost marker to finish what MacReady started decades earlier. I got to admit the visual effects look good despite being cheap, but the entire movie is just one huge waste of time with preposterous moments, unbelievable dialogue and a far-fetched setting that just gets more and more outlandish. Why couldn't they have just ditched the entire premise and just did a straight ghost story? The reason is that this movie was not made for a generic audience; it was actually aimed directly for the five-second attention span of the Digital Generation. These are the kids who have never cracked open a book in their life and would not know a decent horror movie even if they were trapped in one. Today's teenagers will never know the talents of Edgar Allen Poe or Bram Stoker or even realize the long-lasting immortality of the Universal horror movies of the Thirties and the Forties. "Ghost Town" like all SyFy movies is nothing but pure kitsch and camp. The reason it looks so cheap is because it was rushed to be a TV-movie. However, at one time, there were decent horror TV movies when networks paid high amounts for talented writers to create movies like "The Night Stalker" and "The Bermuda Depths," movies that today have huge cults of fans. Movies like "Ghost Town," "House Of Bones" and "Sharknado" are meant for a more jaded, less cerebral audience that won't appreciate the movies of a generation or two earlier. So, is "Ghost Town" a bad movie? Yes, yes, it is, but it's also a victim of its time when less effort is put into substance and more into production. It could have been made so much better, but then, it would not have appealed to its target audience.

Before being commissioned for producing films for Syfy, UFO Entertainment were perhaps the preceding "mockbuster" company to The Asylum, although their movies actually weren't that obviously inspired by current films. Some people would call "Dragon Storm" UFO's analogue to "Reign of Fire". They're sadly mistaken."Ghost Town" would be the aforementioned analogue; it doesn't outwardly resemble "Reign of Fire" but there is one connection; it's more boring than anyone could possibly expect.A debate team and hockey team are heading towards home when they somehow find themselves under attack from ghost cowboys. Unfortunately nobody remembered to bring any personnality on their trip and nothing else provides any reason for audiences to be interested.

Well there is 85mins of my life that I will never get back. This really is the worst film I have ever seen (and I've seen Dragon Wars). Don't know why films like this get made. One of the "ghosts" from 1866 uses a box of safety matches to do some dirty work - very safety conscious them 1866 cowboys. Billy Drago is lookin sad and old these days and his scary persona has all but vanished in this one with the scary having to come from some (not so) special effects. All the kids are deeply annoying without a touch of acting ability between them and the set seems to be made from old food boxes - Avoid wasting a night of your life on this one NO STARS